by that want of intellectual self-sufficiency which impelled her to seek a leader and guide, regarded even her most innocent interchange of sympathies with other men as a transgression of duty. Incessant conjugal friction and disputes at last put an end to all community of feeling. Even the two children who were the fruit of the marriage could not keep their parents together. In 1831 George Sand went to live in Paris alone. The documents connected with the ensuing separation suit, as also George Sand's own letters, give us an adequate understanding of what her married life was. I have read in the _Gazette des Tribunaux_ (30th July and 1st and 19th August 1836, and 28th June and 12th July 1837) the pleas advanced on both sides. They were horrible, disgraceful accusations which this great woman was obliged to hear from the lips of her husband's counsel. With her beautiful dark hair falling over a black velvet jacket, or else dressed, in the fashion of the day, in white, with a flowered shawl round her shoulders, George Sand sat and listened without a trace of emotion. Her husband accused her of having conceived and yielded to a criminal passion for another man within three years of her marriage. "Monsieur Dudevant soon discovered that he was being deceived by the woman he worshipped (!), but was magnanimous enough to forgive." The lawyer read a long letter from Madame Dudevant to her husband, in which she confessed, and reproached herself for, various faults, and attributed the misunderstanding between them to an incompatibility in their characters which by no means implied an absence of generosity and amiability on his part. This letter, Monsieur Dudevant's counsel most illogically argued, was equivalent to a confession of unfaithfulness on the lady's part. He went on to show how the couple had lived from 1825 to 1828 in voluntary separation, and how Madame Dudevant, even after she left her husband in 1831 to lead "the life of an artist," had carried on an amicable correspondence with him and accepted 300 francs (!) a year. (He did not mention that she had brought her husband a dowry of 500,000.) At the beginning of the year 1835 the couple had come to a private agreement each to take a child, to divide the fortune, and to allow each other full liberty of action; but before this agreement came into force George Sand had drawn back and sued for a judicial separation. (In the course of a dispute about their son, Monsieur Dudevant had tried to strike her, had even in the presence of witnesses taken up his gun to fire at her.) In spite of exaggerated accusations her application, the lawyer reminded the court, had been refused. Now it was Monsieur Dudevant's turn to complain. He denied all the charges brought against him, and brought others, of the gravest character, against his wife; he maintained that any woman who had written such immoral books as hers was unfit to educate her children; he accused her of intimacy with the secrets of "all the